Today’s SEO Trends

You should not consider Social Media Optimization a distraction from your normal SEO efforts. This should be considered a boost to your site's SEO prospects.

Social Media Optimization activities may include back links from individual social media sites, creation of credible profiles on these sites, and targeting towards real time searching. The bigger impact you can cast on the social networking sites, the bigger your SEO prospects will improve.

Website Speed and On-Page SEO Activities

There are some who rely on off-page optimization rather than on-page optimization. But now days you should give equal, if not more attention to on-page optimization. Most importantly, the site load-time is going to be very important. Google, in its effort to improve websites' performance has decided to penalize those sites that take a longer to load. Simultaneously, improper use of Meta tags in websites’ will have a negative effect on major search engines.

The Web Is Going Mobile

With the Smartphone explosion people are obviously surfing websites on their mobiles more than ever. This trend is going to continue to increase. The number of mobile Internet users has touched almost 100 million already. The need for optimizing your site for mobile users will naturally be more pressing. Your site needs to be optimized for relevant mobile applications, such as Google's Mobile Search Services and mobile keyword tool in AdWords.

Online Videos

Your site needs to be powered with YouTube video clips. If you upload a video on YouTube against a particular keyword, your site gets a better opportunity to be "visible" by leading search engines like Google against that keyword.

One cannot ignore the growing popularity of YouTube. It has outdone Yahoo! To become the second largest search engine in U.S. Therefore, putting up a relevant video on YouTube not only enhances your site's SEO prospects in Google, but boosts up the SEO prospects in YouTube itself.

Personalized Search

One of the important trends in online search features is personalized searching. This trend will get further intensified as time goes by. Google, the global leader, has made personalized search the default option. Unless users opt out of this default option, they are likely to experience only personalized search features from Google. Personalized search results are based on the user's web surfing habits.

With that said, the probability of your website showing up on the search results is going to be lesser, unless your site is one of the frequently accessed sites by the user. If your site is widely popular and users access it frequently, you are likely to enjoy better search positioning on the days ahead.

Local Search

Leading search engines like Google have started depending on local search listings. You should emphasize more on improving your site's SEO abilities in local search engines. Dominating the local listings should be a bit easier as there are a smaller number of players. Big search engines will then filter the top results into their search lists and you will get an automatic entry.